Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Elon Musk – the Bowie of Business

Having just finished Morley’s brilliant biography of Bowie,
it struck me that Musk is the Bowie of business. Constantly reinventing
himself; Paypal hero, Tesla road warrior, Solar City sungod, Starman with Space
X and now the sci-fi Hyperloop hipster- and he’s still only in his forties. Strange
fact this but the first Tesla car was codenamed DarkStar.

But let’s not stretch Bowies leg warmers too far. Ashlee
Vance’s biography of Elon Musk is magnificent for mostly other reasons. It’s about
Musk the man, his psychology. There’s a manic intensity to Musk, but it’s
directed, purposeful and, as Vance says, it’s not about making money. Time and
time again he puts everything he’s made into the next, even weirder and riskier
project. Neither is he a classic business guy or entrepreneur. For him
questions come first and everything he does is about finding answers. He
despises the waste of intellect that gets sucked into the law and finance, as
he’s a child of the Enlightenment and sees as his destiny the need to
accelerate progress. He doesn’t want to oil the wheels, he wants to drive, foot
to the metal, the fastest electric car ever made then ride a rocket all the way
to Mars. As he says, he wants to die there – just not on impact. Always on the
edge of chaos, like a kite that does its best work when it stalls and falls but
then it soars.

Time and time again experience tells me, and I read, about
actual leaders who bear no resemblance to the utopian model presented by the bandwagon
‘Leadership’ industry. The one exception is Stanford’s Pfeffer, who also sees
the leadership industry as peddling unreal, utopian platitudes. Musk has a
string of business successes behind him, including PayPal, and is the major
shareholder in three massive, public companies, all of which are innovative,
successful and global. He has taken on the aerospace, car and energy industries
at breathtaking speed, with mind-blowing innovation. Yet he is known to be mercurial,
cantankerous, eccentric, mean, capricious, demanding, blunt, delivers vicious
barbs, swears like a trooper, takes things personally, lacks loyalty and has
what Vance calls a ‘cruel stoicism’ –all of these terms taken from the book. He
demands long hours and devotion to the cause and is cavalier in firing people. “Working
at Tesla was like being Kurtz in Apocalypse Now”. So, for those acolytes of
‘Leadership’ and all the bullshit that goes with that domain, he breaks every
damn rule – then again so do most of them – in fact that’s exactly why they
succeed. They’re up against woozies who believe all that shit about leading
from behind.

So why are people loyal to him and why does he attract the
best talent in the field? Well, he has vision. He also has a deep knowledge of
technology, is obsessive about detail, takes rapid decisions, doesn’t like
burdensome reports and bureaucracy, likes shortcuts and is a fanatic when it
comes to keeping costs down. Two small asides – he likes people to turn up at
the same time in the morning and hates acronyms. I like this. His employees are
not playing pool or darts mid-morning and don’t lie around being mindful on
brightly coloured bean bags. It’s relentless brainwork to solve problems
against insane deadlines.

You may disagree but he does think that it is only
technology that will deliver us from climate change, the dependence on oil and
allow us to inhabit planets other than our own and his businesses form a nexus
of energy production, storage and utilisation that, he thinks, will save our
species. He may be right.